High-performance piston aircraft don't like operating much above 18,000 feet and to get them to do so you have to outfit them with temperamental accessories such as superchargers, turbochargers and intercoolers that are prone to break, shorten an engine's useful life or both.

Morphing a commuter jet into a bizliner is no easy task, but Embraer has succeeded with the Legacy 600. The aircraft is based on the wildly successful and rugged EMB 135, a 37-seat commuter jet. When introduced in 2002, the Legacy offered a simple value proposition: a capacious cabin on par with that of a Gulfstream GV–and for half the price. Today, used Legacies are an even bigger bargain.

The protagonist in the 1970s American television show The Six Million Dollar Man was an injured astronaut who’d had various mangled body parts replaced with bionic ones that gave him superhuman abilities. All of this is recounted in the show’s opening credits, while the narrator enthusiastically intones, “We can make him better than he was before.

You may be a VIP, but if you've flown on executive helicopters, you've likely had to sit knee-to-knee with other executives on perches better suited for horse jockeys. Even the slick Sikorsky S-76-in production since the 1970s and widely considered the gold standard for corporate rotorcraft-can seem a bit confining with six adult male passengers aboard.

The uber jet's rarefied air was new territory for Bombardier when it announced the long-range, large-cabin Global Express in 1991. Bombardier's challenge to Gulfstream's dominance of the market for large corporate jets was fraught with perils that would show up on early-production aircraft nearly 10 years later.

When Bill Lear created the Learjet in the early 1960s, he envisioned a small, fast and ­simple airplane, a concept the marketplace embraced. His 20-series and the slightly elongated 30-series ­aircraft that followed sold briskly for more than 20 years, until long after he had left the company.

I've heard private jets described in many ways over the years, but this was a first.
"It works really good as a canoe," joked Dale Printy, director of technical services for Worthington Aviation, the company charged with product support for the Westwind series of business aircraft.